SAP also announced plans for its first global SAP Leonardo event for SAP customers, partners and IoT experts in Frankfurt Jul 11-12

SAP Leonardo

Digging into the announcement a little bit, SAP has long needed strong branding to pull together its offerings in the IoT space. The choice of the Leonardo name is a particularly apt one given, da Vinci’s timeless association with breathtaking vision (Leonardo dreamt up helicopters, tanks, submarines, amongst other things long before the technologies existed to create them). But there is another, possibly less obvious reason, it is an appropriate choice of name – the Internet of Things crosses all verticals (this is one of the reasons I find it so interesting), and so too did da Vinci. He didn’t restrict himself to painting, or sculpture, as many other great artists did. In fact, the Wikipedia entry for Leonardo states

Leonardo was an Italian polymath whose areas of interest included invention, painting, sculpting, architecture, science, music, mathematics, engineering, literature, anatomy, geology, astronomy, botany, writing, history, and cartography. He has been variously called the father of palaeontology, ichnology, and architecture, and is widely considered one of the greatest painters of all time

Connected People – Strives to improve lives, work and health by connecting people and communities and providing better lifestyle experiences and opportunities for organizations to evolve into new business models

SAP Jump-Start program

Then under the new SAP Leonardo brand, and following on from the recent announcement of SAP’s €2bn investment in the Internet of Things, part two of the announcement talks about the new SAP Leonardo Jump Start program. This is, I believe, hugely important for any organisations looking to start an IoT pilot program in earnest.

The offering consists of an executive design thinking session to kick off the customer’s project and identify an area for innovation, a rapid prototyping workshop to develop a real prototype to validate the vision, and finally an implementation phase to convert the prototype into a live pilot project and define an IoT roadmap for further business processes.

To my mind, the most interesting aspect of the offer though is that it has a fixed price for the software and services to cover the pilot and first year of usage of SAP Leonardo solutions. I can see this proving very compelling for organisations looking to investigate seriously the IoT, but not wishing to encounter sticker shock.

Jump-Start uses the standard solution in pilot and all are Cloud solutions

It is available in all regions

Industry Value Engineering is included to help generate the business case

The pilot includes services and a 1 year contract for the Cloud license for 1 solution. The pilot is a 3 month project.

Can be purchased by client through their sales representative or visit SAP.com.

And SAP are currently evaluating opportunities for 3rd party participation.

And finally there is the announcement of the first SAP Leonardo event this coming July. This should provide an amazing opportunity for customers, partners, and SAP experts to discuss progress on the first six months of the SAP Leonardo announcement, and Jump-Start program.

Leonardo da Vinci once famously said:

…people of accomplishment rarely sat back and let things happen to them. They went out and happened to things

Leonardo da Vinci

With this announcement SAP are telling the market that now is the time for SAP to go out and happen to the Things.